Voter fraud is real, pervasive, and purposed. But don’t take it from me. Listen to Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis.
Davis is a unique Democrat who acknowledges voter fraud is a reality that his party deliberately ignores, and pushed back against progressives claiming that worries over voter fraud are rooted in prejudice toward minorities.
“What I have seen in my state, in my region, is the most aggressive practitioners of voter-fraud are local machines who are tied lock, stock and barrel to the special interests in their communities — the landfills, the casino operators — and they’re cooking the [ballot] boxes on election day, they’re manufacturing absentee ballots, they’re voting [in the names of] people named Donald Duck, because they want to control politics and thwart progress.”
Davis argued that voter identification would protect minorities, including non-citizens, from politicians who are lobbied by special interests groups to resist anti-fraud measures.
If you believe in more transparency around connections in politics and money in politics, how can you not believe in transparency when it comes to the core of politics which is voting?”
My state of California is not so fortunate to have Democrats like Arthur Davis, who admits Democratic Party bosses benefit from voter fraud, but rather those who teeter between outright denying voter fraud happens and fostering an environment conducive to non-citizen voting. In January 2015, California became a state that allows illegal immigrants to obtain a driver’s license by revoking the need for applicants to establish proof of legal presence in the United States. Then in October 2015, under the false pretense that it’s “still too hard for Californians to register to vote,” Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law to register all eligible drivers license holders as voters unless they “opt out.”
But that wasn’t far enough. Investigative journalist Matthew Vadum reported that the “ACCE Institute, League of Women Voters of California, California Common Cause, and the National Council of La Raza” pressured the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to integrate “voter registration material into the forms needed to apply for or renew a driver’s license or state identification card, or submit a change of address.”
The legal battle against the California DMV was spearheaded by the ACCE Institute, the successor of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN), as Vadum writes, “[t]he groups have new names, but the faces behind them are familiar.” ACORN was infamous in California for their aggressive tactics and had several organizers convicted over “identify fraud, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, and other crimes related to the electoral.” ACORN’s mission statement was made clear in the organization’s magazine, Social Policy.
“[E]nlisting millions of new and politicized voters is the way to create an electoral environment hospitable to fundamental change in American society. An enlarged and politicized electorate will sustain and encourage the movements in American society that are already working for the rights of women and minorities, for the protection of the social programs, and for transformation of foreign policy.”
In short, supercharged identity politics. Latinos comprise the dominant demographic in the Golden State and tend to favor the Democratic Party. Likewise, the vast majority of non-citizens in California are Latin American immigrants. Is it so hard to see why Californian progressives vehemently refute voter fraud while organizing, suing, and legislating in ways that are conducive to non-citizen voting?
Progressives have long contend that just because non-citizens might end up on voter rolls, doesn’t mean they’ll actually vote. Again, don’t take it from me, take it from Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN/Project Vote employee. “I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls, you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots.”
Resistance to anti-fraud measures at the ballot box are predicated on the notion that any such measures are inherently discriminatory towards non-whites. I am a racial minority, a Latino, yet I have never felt discouraged from voting and I am not alone. The Pew Research Center reports 97 percent of Latinos registered to vote are confident they have the identification required to vote, and among those Latinos not currently registered to vote, 85 percent say the same.
Thomas Sowell has been saying the same thing for decades in response to allegedly “race-based voter suppression,” arguing that “this is part of the cynical politics of promoting as much racial polarization and paranoia as possible.” Sowell further points out that widely available “free photo identification cards mean that poverty is no barrier to voting.”
Trump’s disbandment of the voter fraud commission is not an admittance that fraud doesn’t exist, but an affirmation that the only prudent way forward is voter identification, so why beat around the bush?
States like California need accountability and transparency more than ever. The real disservice is done by those who continue playing along with identity politics, fabricating racial grievances and sacrificing the futures of generations to come for the sake of a false narrative.
Pedro Gonzalez is an associate editor for The Millennial Review.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.